Trends in the LMS Market
Sussex (UK), June 2009 - Kineo has examined the trends in the LMS market, looking at a significant shift towards Software-as-a-service (SaaS). They argue that the growth of open source solutions combined with SaaS could change the face of learning-management systems as we have come to know them. CHECK.point eLearning provides you with a summary of their findings.
Kineo bases its arguments mainly on the recent Elearnity report: "Software as a Service - Impact on Learning & Talent Management Systems" and their own experience. The Elearnity report focuses on a shift in the provision of LMS systems on a software-as-a-service basis.
As Elearnity points out, the company that put SaaS on the corporate radar is Salesforce.com, providers of a SaaS-based Customer Relationship Management solution. With over 41,000 companies using their SaaS solution, Salesforce has revenues of over $700m a year and is still growing at approximately 40-50% per year. The open source alternative Sugar CRM is growing equally fast.
Elearnity looks at what the analysts have to say about SaaS:
Gartner research showed the majority considered SaaS more cost effective than on-premise solutions (61%) and easier and faster to deploy (57%). Other motivations included a lack of IT resources to implement on premise, reduced capital expense, and a perceived higher user acceptance. Overall according to Gartner, 88% of organizations expected to maintain or increase their use of SaaS.
According to Elearnity's own research, new suppliers of SaaS-only learning and talent solutions have appeared in the market and seem to be growing faster than more-established software suppliers that are now also increasingly offering SaaS or "On Demand" versions of their own software.
Kineo believes that the adoption of SaaS combined with the emergence of open source solutions will change the face of corporate learning platforms. Elearnity is not so sure, though they do say: "We believe it is likely rather than inevitable that open source will impact the SaaS learning-and-talent-systems market. But currently, it is too early to say how extensive or rapidly this might manifest itself."
Kineo argues that one has to look at the impact of open source software, as this is changing the software market as significantly, if not more significantly than SaaS. The eLearning Guild report in 2008 showed that Moodle was the most used LMS by corporations of all sizes, with 18% of the market in the US.
